Before we detail our Spring Break, there are a few events and pictures from February and March that I want to include in this post. Tyler and I went on a double date over Valentine's weekend with the Kasallis's, so we had our picture taken at the restaurant. The flash was very bright. We enjoyed the fancy, yummy food; and the place was all decorated for Valentine's. It was a fun evening.
A few pictures of Taryn always make an appearance since she's still with me all the time. Here are some cute ones I took. One Sunday afternoon, Abby was practicing her horn and Taryn decided to "help" her by leading the music. It was so adorable, I had to take a picture and a video to show them playing nicely together. We went to a movie with the Kasallis's one weekend and ended up at Chic-fil-a afterwards for lunch. Taryn and Teagan decided to share their lemonade smoothie and I thought it was the cutest thing.
We joined the YMCA again since Abby's been playing volleyball seasons anyway. We will have the other girls start soccer this summer through the Y as well. Until the summer, the girls started up their gymnastics classes again. I haven't taken many pictures, but I did get one of Taryn as she works on mastering her cartwheel. Taryn is doing intro to gymnastics and ballet. Aubrey and Tessa are both in the advanced gymnastics class and go twice a week for gymnastics and tumbling. They all love it! Now that Aubrey has learned to ride a bike without training wheels, Taryn has been upgraded to a big girl bike with training wheels. We tried going for a ride one day, so I grabbed a picture after she was all ready to ride, but she's still a little nervous and unsteady on such a big bike. She's sticking with the scooters for awhile longer.
Like I mentioned, Abby has been playing volleyball still through the Y; and Tyler and I are still the coaches. We coached three teams this past season, but only got pictures of two of the teams at the end of the season. Abby is still enjoying it and looking forward to trying out for the school team in the Fall. Tyler and I enjoy the extra exercise we get and working with the girls to improve their skills. I tell other people that it's like we get our weekly date night every Friday night when we coach. We just spend it with 20 pre-teen girls. Sounds romantic huh? :)
St. Patrick's Day was right around the same time as Spring Break. We decorated a little, but did not have much around the house. Luckily, we got a fun package full of green items from Grandma and Grandpa Gibbons. The girls posed with their new leprechaun headbands that came in the package. That was pretty much the extent of our St. Patrick's Day celebration.
Now for Spring Break! We ended up staying in El Paso this year thinking that my brothers and their families were coming to visit. But it ended up that kids got sick and some couldn't come, so we had the majority of the week to ourselves. Scott and his family did come up but only for the first weekend. We still enjoyed having them while they were here. They got to see Grandma's new house where they hosted their first slumber party for all the granddaughters. My girls were so excited. We took some pictures before they went to bed and before we left for our night of game playing without any little girl interruptions.
The two youngest, Nadia and Alexa, came back to our house with the adults, but they still were able to enjoy the beds and pictures for a little bit.
Tyler had taken half of the week off from work when we thought we were going to have a lot of family in town, so we did plan one day to do something "vacationy." We decided to drive over to Carlsbad, NM and visit the Carlsbad Caverns. It's something we've wanted to do since we moved to El Paso, but had never done. Tyler had gone recently with the Scouts from church and Tessa, who's been studying cave formations at school, convinced us that we needed to go soon. We also found out that 4th graders get a free pass to National Parks, so we even got in for free. Bonus! My parents came with us too and we had a very enjoyable day. It was pretty busy, but once we started walking into the cave, it wasn't too crowded. Here are the girls as we waited to check in.
I took a ton of pictures as we walked through the caverns, but with just the flash and no real sunshine, the pictures are not great and do not do justice to the awesome formations that are there. Here's our family before going down into the natural entrance.
So here are a few pictures we took of the girls and you can see some of the formations that we saw as we walked and walked and walked.
There were so many formations! Stalactites from the ceiling, stalagmites from the ground and so many columns. It was amazing!
The girls all walked on their own and there was very little complaining. We were so proud of them. We did ride the elevator back to the top, so we didn't have to do the walk/climb back up to the entrance. We took pictures outside the visitor center with one of the main signs to always remember our trip. It was a really fun day.
The caverns are in the middle of nowhere, only near a very tiny town with just a few shops and one gas station. We stopped there to get a few snacks for the drive home, and had fun walking around their tourist shop. The girls found these bar stools and thought they were hilarious. The huge bear statue was a pretty funny sight as well.
We finished off our Spring Break week by swimming. The water was freezing! But the girls had decided to dub it the Polar Ice Challenge and convince people to swim in it with them anyway. They had fun for a few minutes before warming up on the hot driveway or just staying on the edge of the pool playing lifeguard.
I was happy to have our pool up and running and available for them to swim in this early in the year. It was a great way to end our Spring Break!
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